Friday, March 23, 2018

The city of Atlanta government has
apparently become the victim of a ransomware attack. The city’s
official Twitter account announced that the city government “is
currently experiencing outages on various customer facing
applications, including some that customers may use to pay bills or
access court-related information.”

According to a
report from Atlanta NBC affiliate WXIA, a city employee sent the
station a screen shot of a ransomware message demanding a payment of
$6,800 to unlock each computer or $51,000 to provide all the keys for
affected systems. Employees received emails from the city’s
information technology department instructing them to unplug their
computers if they noticed anything suspicious. An internal email
shared with WXIA said that the internal systems affected include the
city’s payroll application.

… Forensic crash analysts who reviewed the
video said a human driver could have responded more quickly to the
situation, potentially saving the life of the victim, 49-year-old
Elaine Herzberg. Other experts said Uber’s self-driving sensors
should have detected the pedestrian as she walked a bicycle across
the open road at 10 p.m., despite the dark conditions.

… Zachary Moore, a senior forensic engineer at
Wexco International Corp. who has reconstructed vehicle accidents and
other incidents for more than a decade, analyzed the video footage
and concluded that a typical driver on a dry asphalt road would have
perceived, reacted, and activated their brakes in time to stop about
eight feet short of Herzberg.

Other experts questioned the technology. The Uber
SUV’s "lidar and radar absolutely should have detected her and
classified her as something other than a stationary object,"
Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who
studies self-driving cars, wrote in an email.

Smith said the video doesn’t fully explain the
incident but "strongly suggests a failure by Uber’s automated
driving system and a lack of due care by Uber’s driver (as well as
by the victim)."

… According
to Armor’s The
Black Market Report: A Look into the Dark Web(PDF),
anyone can DDoS an organization for only $10 an hour or $200 per day.
Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) access for a system for three months
costs only $35.

Vivaldi, the
desktop browser app that was launched
in 2016 by Opera cofounder Jon von Tetzchner, has introduced a
small but interesting new feature today.

As most other browsers do, Vivaldi offers a
private browsing mode that offers a degree of privacy insofar as it
doesn’t record the sites you visit or store cookies and temporary
files. However, moving forward, Vivaldi will also make
privacy-focused DuckDuckGo the
default search engine within private browsing windows, irrespective
of what your default search engine is in the normal browsing mode.

Founded in 2008, DuckDuckGo is pitched as the
antithesis of Google, insofar as it doesn’t profile or track its
users around the web. It
also promises to serve the same results to all users.

Launched earlier this year as a part of
the Usable
Privacy Project, the tool uses artificial intelligence to crawl
through 7,000 of the web’s most popular sites, including Facebook,
Reddit, and Twitter, and parse their privacy policies. That data is
available on the project’s website, where you can search for a site
and see a breakdown of some of the most pivotal information included
in that site’s privacy policy, including whether the company that
owns the site is collecting data on its users, and whether it’s
sharing that data with any third parties.

… it was now relatively common for
fingerprints of the deceased to be depressed on the scanner of Apple
iPhones, devices which have been wrapped up in increasingly powerful
encryption over recent years. For instance, the technique has been
used in overdose cases, said one source. In such instances, the
victim's phone could contain information leading directly to the
dealer.

No
privacy for the dead

And it's entirely legal for police to use the
technique, even if there might be some ethical quandaries to
consider. Marina Medvin, owner of Medvin Law, said that once a
person is deceased, they no longer have a privacy interest in their
dead body. That means they no longer have standing in court to
assert privacy rights.

… "We do not need a search warrant to get
into a victim's phone, unless it's shared owned," said Ohio
police homicide detective Robert Cutshall

… Whilst Face ID is supposed to use your
attention in combination with natural eye movement, so fake or
non-moving eyes can't unlock devices, Rogers found that the tech can
be fooled simply using photos of open eyes. That was something also
verified by Vietnamese researchers when they claimed
to have bypassed Face ID with specially-created masks in November
2017, said Rogers.

Another day
another revelation about Facebook giving researcher data on 57B users

The
Guardian – “Before Facebook suspended
Aleksandr Kogan from its platform for the data harvesting “scam”
at the centre of the unfolding Cambridge Analytica scandal, the
social media company enjoyed a close enough relationship with the
researcher that it provided him with an anonymised, aggregate dataset
of 57bn Facebook friendships. Facebook provided the dataset of
“every friendship formed in 2011 in every country in the world at
the national aggregate level” to Kogan’s University of Cambridge
laboratory for a study
on international friendships published in Personality and
Individual Differences in 2015. Two Facebook employees were named as
co-authors of the study, alongside researchers from Cambridge,
Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. Kogan was
publishing under the name Aleksandr Spectre at the time. A
University of Cambridge press
release on the study’s publication noted that the paper was
“the first output of ongoing research collaborations between
Spectre’s lab in Cambridge and Facebook”. Facebook did not
respond to queries about whether any other collaborations occurred.
“The sheer volume of the 57bn friend pairs implies a pre-existing
relationship,” said Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow
Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. “It’s not
common for Facebook to share that kind of data. It suggests a
trusted partnership between Aleksandr Kogan/Spectre and Facebook.”
Facebook downplayed the significance of the dataset, which it said
was shared with Kogan in 2013. “The data that was shared was
literally numbers – numbers of how many friendships were made
between pairs of countries – ie x number of friendships made
between the US and UK,” Facebook spokeswoman Christine Chen said by
email. “There was no personally identifiable information included
in this data.”

The fact that political parties are
excluded from federal laws on handling personal information — such
as social media data — amounts to “an important gap” that could
jeopardize the integrity of the electoral process, Canada’s privacy
czar says.

There should be a law governing the use
of personal data by parties to prevent manipulation of the
information to influence an election, privacy commissioner Daniel
Therrien said Thursday in an interview.

Health care teams depend on electronic health
records (EHRs) to compile important medical data from innumerable lab
tests and medical devices, observations, treatments, and diagnostic
codes. We rely on it so much that we consider the EHR to be a team
member.

But in fast-paced critical care units, where even
small errors can have big consequences, this digital team member can
overload physicians with information. The sheer volume of data in
EHRs creates a staggering challenge in complex environments such as
intensive care units (ICUs) and emergency medicine departments.
Individual clinicians may have to sift through more than 50,000 data
points to find key information. This proliferation of data (both
meaningful and meaningless) and the workload created by EHR systems
have been key drivers of clinician burnout and, paradoxically,
introduced new threats
to patient safety. What is more, relying only on EHR data
greatly limits the insights derived from artificial intelligence
algorithms or big data analytics.

Mayo Clinic, the nation’s second-largest
critical-care provider in the United States, with nearly 350 beds in
15 intensive care units (ICUs) across its campuses in Minnesota,
Arizona, and Florida, decided to combat the data deluge with ambient
intelligence: a set of decision-making tools powered by data on
and insights into clinicians’ goals, work environments, strengths,
and performance constraints. When layered on top of existing
information infrastructure, ambient-intelligence applications can cut
through the clutter and deliver the right information in a digestible
form that clinicians can use, quickly and effectively at the
patient’s bedside.

The popular online classified ads site Craigslist
has stopped publishing personal ads after the Senate approved a
controversial sex trafficking bill that makes website operators more
accountable for their users' activities.

Craigslist's personal ads have for decades been a
popular way for people to make romantic connections, but with the
Senate's approval
Wednesday of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex
Trafficking Act (FOSTA), Craigslist said it couldn't afford risking
its operations by running personal ads.

… The legislation
-- approved by both branches of Congress – amends Section 230 of
the Communications Decency Act from 1996, which many online platforms
saw as a vital protection from liability for content posted by their
users. The legislation makes it a crime to operate an internet
platform with the intent of promoting prostitution.

Supporters say the legislation will help curb the
growing epidemic of online sex trafficking that often involves
children, while opponents argue it could expose tech companies to
costly lawsuits and infringe on free speech.

Google
Scholar Blog Quickly flip through papers on your phone. “Today,
we are making it easier to use your phone to find and scan scholarly
articles. Clicking a Scholar search result on your phone now opens a
quick preview. You can swipe left and right to quickly flip through
the list of results. Where available, you can read abstracts. Or
explore related and citing articles, which appear at the bottom of
the preview along with other familiar Scholar features…”

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.